Besides the Nixon example, look to former Neo-Conservatine , now Liberal, Francis Fukuyama: who once he ensorceled a cadre of American philosphocal naifs, with an Hegalian pastisch! Or Liz Chaney as the now ally of The New Democrats in the Impeachment of Trump. Recall that Clinton welcomed the likes of the utterly vacious Neo-Con Bill Kristol.
In the case of David Brooks look to his ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ as his ascedency to the New York Times, via his wan literary invention of Joey Tabla Rasa! In his latest essay steeped in self-condratulation and vexving moral quandires, whose knot he is going to untie. I will skip the first paragraph!
…
A few years ago, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Angela Duckworth, got a bit more specific. She wrote that character formation means building up three types of strengths: strengths of the heart (being kind, considerate, generous), strengths of the mind (being curious, open-minded, having good judgment) and strengths of the will (self-control, determination, courage).
I’m one of those people who think character is destiny and that moral formation is at the center of any healthy society. But if you’re a teacher in front of a classroom, with 25 or more distracted students in front of you, how exactly can you pull this off? Moral formation isn’t just downloading content into a bunch of brains; it involves an inner transformation of the heart. It involves helping students change their motivations so that they want to lead the kind of honorable and purposeful lives that are truly worth wanting. It’s more about inspiration than information.
And yet every day, there are schools that are doing it. On just about every campus I visit there are professors who teach with the idea that they can help their students become better people. It may be a literature professor teaching empathy or a physics professor who doesn’t teach only physics but also the scientific way of life — how to lead a life devoted to wonder, curiosity, intellectual rigor and exploration.
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Editor: Mr. Brooks supplies a list of imperatives!
A countercultural institutional ethos.
The moral skills.
Exemplars.
Moral traditions.
Deep reading.
Self-confrontation.
Paid public service.
Editor: What might the reader think of Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay? Compared to Mr. Brooks morally inflected chatter, in what place does Immanuel Kant’s essay of 1784 fit?
An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?
IMMANUEL KANT (1784)
Translated by Ted Humphrey Hackett Publishing, 1992
1. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.[2] Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude![3] “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.
2. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes),[4] nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the gocart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts.
3. Thus, it is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature. He has even become fond of this state and for the time being is actually incapable of using his own understanding, for no one has ever allowed him to attempt it. Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity. Whoever threw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over the smallest ditch, since he is unaccustomed to this kind of free movement. Consequently, only a few have succeeded, by cultivating their own minds, in freeing themselves from immaturity and pursuing a secure course.
Editor: Mr. Brooks is an utterly conventional journalist , an employee of The New York Times, and a cultivator of his readerships vanity: as a function of his readerships adulation of a poltical technocrat, who refracts their values back at them, in a the most highfalutin terms !
Rootless cosmopolitan,down at heels intellectual;would be writer.
'Polemic is a discourse of conflict, whose effect depends on a delicate balance between the requirements of truth and the enticements of anger, the duty to argue and the zest to inflame. Its rhetoric allows, even enforces, a certain figurative licence. Like epitaphs in Johnson’s adage, it is not under oath.'
https://www.lrb.co.uk/v15/n20/perry-anderson/diary
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